Brecht and Adorno

Brecht

• Art is by definition a political intervention. It can never be apolitical • Alienation effect “A” effect• Art works producing entertainment. Theatre’s ultimate purpose is pleasure• ? Anti-instrumentality of the endeavor (as opposed to fascist art?)• Emphasis on historical specificity: each society produces its own kinds of theater • Unexamined: B does not rethink the role of science, but he proposes to apply scientific methods

to social life• Influence of Brecht in the US and Latin America: tools, theater, goals. Brechtian theater

contradicts the hegemonic training of actors in the US• Pleasure and politics: Marxist approach to pleasure in politics• his audience is working class• Need to work with emotions, but at distance (anti-theatrical)• Pleasure does not need justification• Theatricality trains the audience to be a good audience

• About Brecht:• Contradictions rational / irrational . Reason / emotion . • working class / intellectuals

Brecht’s proposal for theater

• Goal: To transform audience to a state of suspicious inquiry. Make strange the ordinary

• Tools:• making the state of things looks “strange.” Split between

representation and the object represented?• Theater for “children of the scientific age”• Pleasures: weaker (simple) and stronger (complex) • Attitude towards society as attitude towards nature• Appeals to rationality (as opposed to the irrationality of fascism)• Anti-naturalist: making things look strange: separating the character

and the actor/actress so there is no way of identify both

Adorno• Art not only addresses its issues by taking them as subject• There is no un-political art, for there is no outside of society• Committed: explicit political involvement and message of art. Art as

a means• Autonomous: art for art’s sake. Art as an end• even when oppositional, art is always part of society• Showing suffering as obscene

• about Adorno:• ? Consumerism / victimizing?• How to talk about violence without reproducing violence?• Educating audience vs. creating work ? • Reenactment of traumatic situation can be healing:

Fascism and Political Performance

• Private vs. public

• Private is exposed

Notes to retake

• Popular

• Commodification of the tools

• political effective

• Role of the audience in live and mediated (transmitted) performance

Notes on the images

• The intellectuals, politics, the academy• Artists and the state. How can art be socially

relevant?– Adding to the problem vs. addressing something that

is silenced– Contributing to healing process

• How can academic work be socially relevant?• Latour’s “factishes,” in the analysis of belief and

fact